There’s a newly launched service to protect your privacy, currently only available in the Greater Toronto Area and rolling out to the rest of Canada later this year, and it is called Tigits. What is Tigits? Their self description reads “Tigits are a second, changeable, and totally anonymous number for your phone, so you can keep you main number private. And talk safely.” Basically, the idea is that if you are ever in a situation where you don’t want to give out your real, main phone number you can give out your tigits (‘tigits’ is a portmanteau of ‘temporary’ and ‘digits’ so it can be used as a noun here and doesn’t require referring to a ‘Tigits number’). Tigits provides a number you can use and switch as often as you like for a monthly charge.

Through a special offer with Tigits we got them to give our readers a FREE MONTH to use Tigits by entering the Referral Code LB2415 on the signup page. In order to use the code and get a free month you have to select the 1 month plan (you can switch it later).

So what is the point of using the Tigits service? According to a CBC article from 2010, the target audience of Tigits is women who are going on dates with people they’ve met on internet dating sites and want to protect their real phone number when they’re making arrangements to meet with these strangers in the real world. It can also be used by people who are selling or buying items online and don’t want to give their phone numbers out to every random person involved in the sale and/or buying of the item. A further use, similar to the first one above, is for people who go out on the club & bar scene. When you meet someone it isn’t always in your interest to give out your real number as you might later regret it. Giving them tigits means you can always ‘disconnect’ that number and not have to worry about that person contacting you ever again. I actually met a lady this past weekend at a friend’s birthday who was having just that problem. A man she met over 6 months ago continues to contact her and she just wishes he would stop - she refers to him as her ‘stalker’.

Check out popular Toronto vlogger Sean Ward’s video of his hilarious use of Tigits, he calls a stripper in Las Vegas so possible NSFW warning.

[Link for mobile friendly viewing]

Tigits allowed me to have a free trial of the service so if you want to give me a call and hear what it sounds like feel free to do so, my tigits are 647-788-5992. I tested it amongst my friends and they told me that they could not tell that they were calling a number different than if I had given them a regular direct line number. When one of my friends called me he told me that it took about 3 rings on his end before I picked up. Call quality was exactly the same as calling any other cell phone according to my friends and on my end I experienced the same thing.

What the Tigits service does beyond assigning you a temporary, disposable number is it also screens calls. When someone calls your tigits line the Call ID on your phone shows your Tigits as calling you. When you pick up you hear an automated voice reading the phone number calling you with an option to accept or refuse the call. If you refuse (or don’t pick up) Tigits will send the number to a special voicemail which you can set up to have 9 different, saved greeting messages and then delivers the voicemail as an mp3 to your email (you can also check it the old fashioned way, by calling in and checking your voicemail on your Tigits line). Currently text message receiving and sending is unavailable via a Tigits line but it is planned to be released soon.

What if you use a tigits line and then discard it? How does someone else know they aren’t going to be getting calls from people looking for you? Tigits has put in place an ingenious system where if I discard a number and it is still getting calls to it Tigits will not release it into the pool of numbers for a specific amount of time - I was quoted 10 days or so - after the last unsuccessful attempt was made to contact that number.

Remember through a special offer with Tigits we got them to give our readers a FREE MONTH to use Tigits by entering the Referral Code LB2415 on the signup page. In order to use the code and get a free month you have to select the 1 month plan (you can switch it later). If you want to test it out, give me a call on my Tigits at 647-788-5992.

For More Info:

Tigits’ site here

Tigits sign up page here

CBC News Article referred to above here